Girls on the Edge: Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls

Psychologist and physician Leonard Sax’s work with young people reveals that girls today have an incredibly brittle sense of self. Though they may look confident on the outside, teens and tweens are fragile inside, obsessed with grades, sports, networking sites, and appearances. They are confused about their sexual identity, as environmental toxins are accelerating physical maturity faster than their emotional maturity.

The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt Our Kids When We Treat Them Like Grown-Ups

In The Collapse of Parenting, Leonard Sax, an acclaimed expert on parenting and childhood development, identifies a key problem plaguing American children, especially relative to other countries: the dramatic decline in young people's achievement and psychological health. The root of this problem, Sax contends, lies in the transfer of authority from parents to their children, a shift that has been occurring over the last 50 years and is now impossible to ignore.

Boys Adrift: Factors Driving the Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, they are less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. Fully one-third of men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents, about a 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. Boys nationwide are increasingly dropping out of school; fewer are going to college. Family physician and research psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax presents practical solutions.

From the moment a mother holds her newborn son, his eyes tell her that she is his world. But often, as he grows up, the boy who needs her simultaneously pushes her away. Calling upon thirty years of experience as a pediatrician, Meg Meeker, MD, a highly sought-after national speaker, assistant professor of clinical medicine, and mother of four, shares the secrets that every mother needs to know in order to strengthen-or rebuild-her relationship with her son.

How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success

In How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims draws on research; on conversations with admissions officers, educators, and employers; and on her own insights as a mother and as a student dean to highlight the ways in which overparenting harms children, their stressed-out parents, and society at large.

Boys Should Be Boys

What are little boys made of? It used to be frogs, snails, and puppy dog tails, but today it is MTV, ADD, and STDs. So how do parents raise their sons to be respectful and responsible young men in a toxic culture that relentlessly undermines masculine virtues such as moral strength, self-restraint, and respect for women? By letting boys be boys.

Your toddler throws a tantrum in the middle of a store. Your preschooler refuses to get dressed. Your fifth-grader sulks on the bench instead of playing on the field. Do children conspire to make their parents’ lives endlessly challenging? No - it’s just their developing brain calling the shots! In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the best-selling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson demystify the meltdowns and aggravation, explaining the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures.

It's the 21st century, and although we tried to rear unisex children - boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks - we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important "hardwired" differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is a validation of the status quo.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children

NurtureShock is a groundbreaking collaboration between award-winning science journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. They argue that when it comes to children, we've mistaken good intentions for good ideas. With impeccable storytelling and razor-sharp analysis, they demonstrate that many of modern society's strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring - because key twists in the science have been overlooked.

The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children

In The Gardener and the Carpenter, pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar 21st-century picture of parents and children is profoundly wrong - it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for kids and parents, too. Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way.

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters

Drawing on her 30 years' experience practicing pediatric and adolescent medicine, teen health expert Dr. Meg Meeker explains why an active father figure is maybe the single most important factor in a young woman's development. In this invaluable guide, Meeker shows how a father can be both counsel and protector for his daughter as she grows into a spiritually and mentally strong young woman.

Wild Things: The Art of Nurturing Boys

Playing off the themes in the Caldecott Medal-winning children's book Where the Wild Things Are, this informative, practical, and encouraging guide will help parents guide boys down the path to healthy and authentic manhood. Wild Things addresses the physical, emotional, and spiritual parts of a boy, written by two therapists who are currently engaged in clinical work with boys and their parents and who are also fathers raising five sons.

The Black Star of Kingston

A century before Heather and Picket's adventures in The Green Ember, a displaced community fights for hope on the ragged edge of survival. Whitson Mariner and Fleck Blackstar face old fears and new enemies, forging a legend that will echo through the ages.

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind

Highlighting the fascinating link between a child’s neurological development and the way a parent reacts to misbehavior, No-Drama Disciplineprovides an effective, compassionate road map for dealing with tantrums, tensions, and tears - without causing a scene. Defining the true meaning of the “d” word (to instruct, not to shout or reprimand), the authors explain how to reach your child, redirect emotions, and turn a meltdown into an opportunity for growth.

The Green Ember

Heather and Picket are extraordinary rabbits with ordinary lives until calamitous events overtake them, spilling them into a cauldron of misadventures. They discover that their own story is bound up in the tumult threatening to overwhelm the wider world.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

Men have been the dominant sex since - well, the dawn of mankind. And yet, as journalist Hanna Rosin discovered, that long-held truth is no longer true. At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead by almost every measure. Already "the end of men" - the phrase Rosin coined - has entered the lexicon as indelibly as Simone de Beauvoir’s "second sex", Betty Friedan’s "feminine mystique", Susan Faludi’s "backlash", and Naomi Wolf’s "beauty myth" have.

What to Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster

Look around you and think for a minute: Is America too crowded? For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that's busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else. It's all bunk. The population bomb never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we've been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies.

The Dark Talent: Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians

Alcatraz Smedry doesn't seem destined for anything but disaster. On his 13th birthday, he receives a bag of sand, which is quickly stolen by the cult of evil Librarians plotting to take over the world. The sand will give the Librarians the edge they need to achieve world domination. Alcatraz must stop them...by infiltrating the local library, armed with nothing but eyeglasses and a talent for klutziness.

Publisher's Summary

Are boys and girls really that different? Twenty years ago, doctors and researchers didn't think so. However, an avalanche of research has shown that sex differences are more significant than anybody guessed. Gender differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated.

Dr. Leonard Sax addresses a host of issues, including discipline, learning, risk-taking, aggression, sex, and drugs and shows how boys and girls react in predictable ways to different situations. A leading proponent of single-sex education, Dr. Sax points out that parents and teachers would do better to recognize, understand, and make use of the biological differences that make a girl a girl and a boy a boy.

What the Critics Say

"[Sax's] readable prose...makes this book accessible to a range of readers." (Publishers Weekly) "The book is thought-provoking, and Sax explains well the science behind his assertions....A worthy read for those who care about how best to prepare children for the challenges they face on the path to adulthood." (Scientific American)

This is more than just a mars vs venus statement of differences, the author gives real practical parenting advice about how to deal with your boy verses your girl on specific subjects like drugs, sex, calling home, internet use, etc. I thought it was very well read and easy to listen to. I have boy/girl twins and think it's important to realize these differences and approach each child uniquely. It would be too easy to treat each hurdle and milestone exactly the same for both children.

Sax presents evidence in a "hit or miss" way. Some of what he has to say is well supported in the literature (e.g., girls lose confidence more quickly than do boys), while other statements are presented without any evidence. When Sax does present studies, he never tells us the number of subjects in any given study nor whether the subjects were selected randomly or other ways of controlling experiments (including keeping subjects from behaving in ways they perceive the experimenter wants them to behave); what is more, the "findings" are presented as if all subjects behaved in a certain way, which is surprising, given that most experiments tell us about likelihood, not certainty. A great deal of the evidence Sax presents is based on studies of animals, showing his implicit assumption that humans evolved from and therefore behave like primates. Unfortunately, Sax does not explain reasons why the reader should accept the analogies. He often presents some study of primates or other animals, then extends a generalized claim about females and males or about human females and males specifically. It ends up casting doubt on everything he says. Nor does Sax make a distinction most scientists make: gender is a sociocultural phenomenon, and sex biological.

This is not to say that gender does not matter nor that Sax gives bad advice. It is just that the advice pretends to be drawn from scientific evidence or as unsupported extensions of other arguments (e.g., boys get a thrill from violent video games; Sax himself played two different games; therefore you should accept his experience with the games as representative of all people's experience and further, you should not allow your child to play the type where it's okay to kill off civilians at will -- note that he also ignores alternative explanations for the "thrill," such as simply violating social norms). Perhaps there are numerous footnotes in the text version that an audiobook does not present.

This book is researched and presented in an interesting and thoughtful manner, andt is entertaining enough to keep you wanting more. I am the mother of four and a middle school teacher and I learned a great deal that I can apply to my own life as a teacher, mother, and grandmother.

of the relevance of approaching male and female children in a different manner in regard to parenting. Still, the book somehow doesn't quite get off the ground and remains too generalized in places and overly simplistic in others.

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Much of the book was interesting, explaining the biological differences between boys and girls. It helps to understand that we as a society cannot keep lumping boys and girls together as being exactly the same.

However, when Sax talks about teenage sex, things teens say to each other, and video games and the like, I could not listen. It sounded as though a few teenagers told him some... untrue things that teenagers do, and he just ran with it.

In all, the parts where Sax discusses biological differences are interesting and informative, but the psychiatrist parts of the book are really not very informative, and come across very opinion-based, as opposed to information-based.

Would you recommend Why Gender Matters to your friends? Why or why not?

I would recommend this book to people who are interested in the actual biological differences between boys and girls, and how those differences affect ability to learn, school performance, emotions, etc. I would not recommend the book to somebody who is looking to figure out what kind of stuff their teenager is doing is doing in his/her off-time. Bad descriptions, inaccuracies, etc.

How could the performance have been better?

Every time there is a word that starts with the letter H, the reader says it as a Y, or doesn't pronounce it at all. For example, apparently, we as a race are "yoomans". It makes me more and more angry every time I hear it.

There are also times when the reader's understanding of how a sentence should be enunciated is all wrong, so it ends up just sounding like an extremely awkward exchange.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

No, this is not that kind of book.

Any additional comments?

The book in and of itself is really not terrible. There is some information that is a little inaccurate pertaining to teenagers ("chicken parties"?), but otherwise it's interesting stuff.

The reader is not good. He needs to figure out how to pronounce things.

The author makes the genders more biological than social against the common belief.It is true that gender is both biological and social and boys and girls should take advantage of both to get the best out of the world and live happily together.

There's a lot of gold in this book, to be honest. The author highlights a lot of gender-related differences between male and female brains. (He doesn't like to use the politically correct distinctions between sex and gender, which can overly simplify the topic, but he does a decent job of presenting recent studies that seem to support his central thesis.)

At the same time, he occasionally jumps from good scientific research on the one hand to biased unscientific research on the other, using faulty logic to give equal weight to both arguments. This approach is dishonest and dangerous because it inserts enough irrefutable facts for the less concrete opinions to appear more solid.

This is worth the read, because it is the most compelling argument I've seen for gender segregation among adolescents. Just keep an open mind, because regardless of where you stand on gender and sexuality, you're probably going to find things you love AND things you hate in Dr. Sax's book.